Women, that disadvantaged American majority, seized the means of consumption at the box office this weekend. As moms, they took their kids to the movies, for a second week, and sustained the top standing of Pixar’s Monsters University, which earned $46.2 million at the North American box office, according to preliminary studio estimates. On Ladies’ Night Out, they flocked to The Heat, the R-rated girl-cop comedy starring Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. Finishing second with a strong $40 million, The Heat lured an audience that was 65% female.

In third place, with $29.8 million, was the holdover hit World War Z, the rare zombie adventure to attract a majority (51%) of women; thanks to Hollywood heartthrob Brad Pitt. Even the weekend’s one action-film underachiever, White House Down, starring man-meat Channing Tatum, had a constituency that was 49% female. Just not big enough. Its $25.7 million plopped the POTUS doomsday saga in fourth place, ahead of Man of Steel’s $20.8 million — making this one of the few three-day weekends in which five movies earned more than $20 million.

[MONDAY UPDATE: Final figures released this afternoon show the two new films a few percentage points below their predicted totals: The Heat at $39.1 million, White House Down at $24.9 million. Monsters University remained in first place with $45.6 million. Both World War Z and Man of Steel finished less than $50,000 below their Sunday estimates.]

Yet the $162.5 million cumulative take of those five films — four of them with a budget of at least $150 million — couldn’t match the $164.8 million rung up this same weekend last year by a more modest quintet: Ted, Magic Mike, Pixar’s Brave, Madea’s Witness Protection Program and DreamWorks Animation’s Madagascar 3. Only the two cartoon features cost more than $50 million; and the Tatum-starring Magic Mike, produced for a preposterously frugal $7 million, grossed $39.1 million — nearly as much as the Bullock-McCarthy comedy and 50% more than Tatum’s current pairing with Jamie Foxx. Does the star’s bevy of femme fans prefer him as a lover, not a fighter? Or was the Tea Party contingent frightened away by the notion of a black President with a gun?

White House Down proved a significant disappointment for Hollywood’s “Master of Disaster”, director Roland Emmerich. His 1996 Independence Day opened to $50.2 million, then notched $306.2 million at the domestic box office and $817.4 million worldwide — nearly $1.5 billion today. In real dollars, Emmerich’s 2009 world’s-end drama 2012 amassed $800 million, The Day After Tomorrow (2004) $700 million; and the 1998 Godzilla almost $650 million.

White House Down suffered by following another embattled-President thriller, Olympus Has Fallen, which opened to $30.4 million back in March. It also failed to match the $27.5-million first weekend for Will Smith’s recent science-fiction flop After Earth. The White House Down patrons, 61% of whom were 25 years or older, liked what they saw: they gave the movie an A-minus in a CinemaScore survey. Some may have come after seeing Foxx’s “Channing All Over Your Tatum,” a video that went viral after being introduced on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show. Foxx is supposed to be planning a sequel to his video, but unless the movie matches the overseas success that usually greets Emmerich pictures, there’ll be no White House Down 2.

A sequel to The Heat was in the works long before this movie opened. That’s how confident the bosses at 20th Century-Fox were that Bullock and McCarthy would strike sparks with the simplest genre-switch: casting two likable women in a typically guys-only buddy cop comedy. Budgeted at a medium-low $43 million, the film registered an A-minus CinemaScore with its gynocentric, older viewers (67% over 25). Director Paul Feig lent the movie the light, rowdy touch he had employed for Bridesmaids, and presto, a palpable hit — the biggest opening number for either actress. With no competition for female-angled fare in the coming weeks, The Heat could stay warm for most of the summer.

Further down the list, Man of Steel isn’t showing great legs beneath those blue tights; the Superman epic should be higher than fifth place in only its third weekend. But it’s earned close to $250 million at the domestic box office and has chalked up $271.7 million abroad, for a $520.4 million global total. That’s well above the $391.1 million that the 2006 Superman Returns earned in its entire run. If the new picture reaches $700 million, Warner Bros. may greenlight a sequel, and perhaps a Justice League spinoff.

That’s Hollywood: a town of high rollers. Never mind that The Heat will be a moneymaker, or that Seth Rogen’s end-of-days farce This Is the End has approached $75 million in its third week, or that the magician caper Now You See Me cracked the $100-million threshold in its fifth. (On the foreign-indie circuit, Pedro Almodóvar’s très-gay airplane farce I’m So Excited! opened to an encouraging $120,000 on five screens.) Moguls prefer to gamble a few hundred million dollars on the chance of spurring a worldwide franchise tentpole, rather than play it safe with more modestly budgeted films.

The problem is that too many big boys are in the game, especially in a summer like this one, crowded with mega-expensive action behemoths. Each superproduction may spend a weekend as box-office champ, only to get mauled a few days later when the next one debuts. If the glut continues, this weekly blockbuster cage match could lead to an economic bloodbath — Hollywood harakiri.

Here are the Sunday estimates of this weekend’s top-grossing pictures in North American theaters, as reported by Box Office Mojo: